Sightlines · a reading
A Deleuzian reading of Gentlemen Prefer Blondes
1953 · Howard Hawks · Gentlemen Prefer Blondes on Sightlines
Pink, edge to edge. Monroe stands in the middle of it in a gown of the same shocking shade, and the men around her have been arranged mostly to keep your eye from drifting off her. Where is this supposed to be? Not the liner. Not Paris. The most famous number in the American musical doesn't take place anywhere. It takes place in a color.
Deleuze has a use for that. Color in film can stop describing a place and start absorbing it: the whole situation gets taken up into a single quality, and the quality becomes the thing you are watching. He calls this the colour-image, an affective colour. The pink isn't décor and isn't mood lighting. It is the feeling of the scene served plain, with a woman and a song inside it. Harry Wild's photography and the 1.37 Academy frame help — this is Fox's last cohort of flat Technicolor musicals, shot months before CinemaScope arrived — because the squarer frame makes a closed, poster-legible composition in which every element has been placed and can be read.
Which matters, because there's a habit with this film: thin plot, great numbers, as though the numbers were interruptions in the story. Read the numbers the way Deleuze reads them and the arrangement flips. The numbers are where the film does its thinking, and the plot is the excuse that gets us to them.
Start with what Jack Cole's choreography does to Lorelei's body. Strong silhouette, angular arms, precise group geometry, and Hugh Fowler's cutting holding a shot long enough for one gesture or one full musical phrase to land. She is kept legible and relatively still. The motion is handed to everything around her. Deleuze noticed this in the American musical and gave it a name: the movement of world. Ordinarily a character perceives a situation and acts on it, and movement belongs to them. In the dance, the character stops driving and becomes the point the world's movement passes through. In the story Lorelei schemes constantly. In the numbers she is carried, and the carrying is the point.
What she is carried into is a social relation made visible as a posture. Deleuze, borrowing from Brecht, calls that the gest: an attitude that exposes the arrangement a body is caught in, instead of a line of dialogue explaining it. In "Diamonds" Lorelei is the merchandise on display and the voice reading out the terms of sale at the same time. Nobody has to say the thesis, because the arms are saying it. Cole had built this machine before. He staged Rita Hayworth's "Put the Blame on Mame" in Gilda on exactly these terms — one woman, a chorus, frontal glamour framing, a glove doing the work of a speech — and before that he carried his jazz-modern isolation vocabulary into Technicolor star display on Cover Girl. When people say Hawks never really directed musicals, what they've actually noticed is that the numbers have a second author.
The plot, meanwhile, is a truth-machine. Esmond Sr. believes Lorelei is after his son's money (she is) and hires Ernie Malone to shadow her and bring back proof. Deleuze splits the action-image into two shapes. In the large form a situation presses down until someone acts and transforms it. In the small form an act comes first and discloses a situation you couldn't otherwise see. Detective stories live in the small form; so does farce; this is both, strung along a voyage that visits the ship, the passengers, Paris. And it runs on a finer mechanism still, the index of equivocity: a gesture that belongs equally to two different situations. A woman is charming to a rich old man who owns diamonds. Enthusiasm or acquisition? The evidence reads both ways, which is the joke and also the reason the detective's report can never be written.
So the film is built out of watching. Once you see that, the numbers rhyme with the surveillance. Russell's "Ain't There Anyone Here for Love?" drops her among a troupe of athletes who decline to look at her while she looks her fill. Deleuze's term for an image that contains someone perceiving, so that you feel the act of looking rather than just its object, is the dicisign. That number reverses the direction of the ogle and turns the look itself into the subject, which is something film theory would need another twenty years to build vocabulary for.
Against the truth-men — a father, a detective, a report — the film sets a forger. Deleuze's powers of the false aren't about lying. They describe a situation where asking which version is true stops paying, and where someone produces a truth instead of reporting one. Lorelei is not hiding a real self behind the breathy voice. The dimness is an instrument in working order, and her account of marriage as a transaction is the most accurate statement anyone in the picture makes. Monroe's face is the hardware. Deleuze describes two poles of the filmed face: the reflecting one, holding a single quality like wonder at its surface, and the intensive one, where small movements build toward a threshold. Lorelei shows you a reflecting face while running an intensive calculation underneath, and the timing keeps both available inside the same second. Be honest about the limits: this is a 1953 studio comedy, and the false never cracks the narration the way it will in Welles or Resnais. The plot resolves, the wedding happens. But the apparatus built to catch her produces nothing, and that is the film's verdict.
The lineage is unusually legible. Anita Loos wrote the template twenty years earlier for Red-Headed Woman: the social climber written as sympathetic and left unpunished. Gold Diggers of 1933 had already turned the pursuit of a man's money into a production number, so the economics-of-desire spine is inherited rather than invented. Hawks brings the rest from his own shelf, the mutual-regard professional pair of His Girl Friday and the showgirl running verbal rings around the men in Ball of Fire. Then he does the thing that makes this picture consequential. He gives the couple to two women. The opening has them in matching red, composed as a mirrored unit, which is close to what Deleuze calls the dividual — a collective rendered as one affective body — shrunk down to a pair. The men are obstacles, prizes, fools. Critics have been arguing that Lorelei and Dorothy are the film's real couple for seventy years; the first number said so in ninety seconds.
What it left behind is partly a method: let the numbers carry the argument the script is too slight to hold, and stage them on a field of pure color rather than a set, which makes the image detachable. The pink and the ring of tuxedos have been quoted and restaged ever since, long after most people stopped being able to summarize the plot. And it is a document of a persona being manufactured in real time, in the same year as Niagara and How to Marry a Millionaire, inside a story about a man hired to catch a woman being false.
Watch it again and try to catch her. Find the frame where Lorelei is sincere, where the construction slips and the real one shows. You won't. That isn't a limit of the performance. It's the architecture, and the pink field is where the film admits it.
Concepts in play
- affective colour (the colour-image) — "Diamonds Are a Girl's Best Friend": Monroe isolated against a saturated hot-pink field with chorus and décor arranged only to hold the eye on her — the number is set in a colour rather than in a location
- movement of world — Jack Cole's staging holds her in strong silhouette and angular arm-shapes while Fowler's cutting waits out a full musical phrase; motion is given to the chorus and surroundings, so the performer is carried rather than acting
- the gest — Cole's choreography makes Lorelei simultaneously the object of display and the commentator on it — the satire about marriage-as-transaction is delivered as posture, inherited from Cole's glove-and-chorus construction for Hayworth in Gilda
- action-image, small form — Esmond Sr. hires detective Ernie Malone to follow Lorelei and report disqualifying behaviour: the farce-as-travelogue strings acts (ship, passengers, Paris) that disclose a hidden situation rather than a situation compelling a transforming act
- index of equivocity — Lorelei's attentions to the diamond-owning "Piggy" Beekman read as innocent enthusiasm and calculated acquisition at once; the dossier's note that her lines register as both innocent and calculating is the comic engine and defeats the detective's report
- dicisign — The commissioned surveillance turns courtship into a comedy of watching and being watched, and Russell's "Ain't There Anyone Here for Love?" inverts the usual gender direction of the ogling gaze among the athletes, staging the look itself
- powers of the false — The Loos-derived satirical thesis that Lorelei's candour about marriage, money and attraction is more honest than the hypocrisy of the men judging her — the father-and-detective truth apparatus produces nothing
- the forger — Monroe plays Lorelei as a comic construction whose apparent dimness is a working screen for shrewd, unembarrassed self-interest — a persona produced rather than a truth concealed, in the same year the "blonde bombshell" star image was being manufactured
- reflexive vs intensive face — Monroe's breathy, deliberately naïve delivery holds a reflecting surface of innocent wonder while the timing keeps the calculating intensity legible underneath in the same beat
- dividual — "Two Little Girls from Little Rock" puts the two stars in matching red and composes them as a mirrored unit, establishing the pair as a single affective body — the film's true couple, with the men as obstacles, prizes and fools
- the closed set (cadre) — Composed for the roughly 1.37:1 Academy frame before Fox's CinemaScope turn: centred, proscenium-like presentation of the numbers and legible, poster-like compositions favoured over restless camera movement